"The RSA security conference took place February 14-18 in San Francisco, and malware response company HBGary planned on a big announcement. The firm was about to unveil a new appliance called "Razor," a specialized computer plugged into corporate networks that could scan company computers for viruses, rootkits, and custom malware—even malicious code that had never been seen before.

Razor "captures all executable code within the Windows operating system and running programs that can be found in physical memory," said HBGary, and it then "'detonates' these captured files within a virtual machine and performs extremely low level tracing of all instructions." Certain behaviors—rather than confirmed signatures—would suggest the presence of malware inside the company.

The HBGary team headed over early to the RSA venue at the Moscone Center in order to set up their booth on the exhibition floor. Nerves were on edge. A week before, HBGary and related company HBGary Federal were both infiltrated by members of the hacker collective Anonymous, which was upset that HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr had compiled a dossier of their alleged real names. In the wake of the attack, huge batches of sensitive company e-mail had been splashed across the 'Net. HBGary employees spent days cleaning up the electronic mess and mending fences with customers.

On the RSA floor, a team put together the HBGary booth and prepared for the Razor announcement. CEO Greg Hoglund prepped his RSA talk, called "Follow the Digital Trail."

The HBGary team left for the night. When they returned the next morning, the opening day of the conference, they found a sign in their booth. It was from Anonymous.

..."

http://static.arstechnica.com/02-24-2011/Anon-sign-RSA.jpg

Full story @ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/anonymous-vs-hbgary-the-aftermath.ars?utm_source=ronpaulforums.com

eOs

02-25-2011, 09:38 PM

Also, Colbert just did a piece on it as well. ^hilarious story bump.

Jinks

02-25-2011, 10:46 PM

its so retarded that a security firm uses a generic CMS without checking its holes.

RyanRSheets

02-28-2011, 08:51 AM

Holy crap, this security firm sounds worse than Computer Associates!

Kludge

02-28-2011, 08:59 AM

Worth noting it also recently came out (via Anon) that HBGary writes malware for the USG.

"...

According to Hoglund, the recipes came with a side dish, a specially crafted piece of malware meant to infect Al-Qaeda computers. Is the US government in the position of deploying the hacker's darkest tools—rootkits, computer viruses, trojan horses, and the like? Of course it is, and Hoglund was well-positioned to know just how common the practice had become. Indeed, he and his company helped to develop these electronic weapons.

Thanks to a cache of HBGary e-mails leaked by the hacker collective Anonymous, we have at least a small glimpse through a dirty window into the process by which tax dollars enter the military-industrial complex and emerge as malware.

Task B

In 2009, HBGary had partnered with the Advanced Information Systems group of defense contractor General Dynamics to work on a project euphemistically known as "Task B." The team had a simple mission: slip a piece of stealth software onto a target laptop without the owner's knowledge.

HBGary white paper on exploiting software
They focused on ports—a laptop's interfaces to the world around it—including the familiar USB port, the less-common PCMCIA Type II card slot, the smaller ExpressCard slot, WiFi, and Firewire. No laptop would have all of these, but most recent machines would have at least two.

..."

Full story @ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/black-ops-how-hbgary-wrote-backdoors-and-rootkits-for-the-government.ars